Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Four Microsoft Programming Languages Compared

Posted by michael on from the pick-your-poison dept.

prostoalex writes "Prashant Sridharan, senior product manager for Microsoft's Visual Studio product, compares four Microsoft languages for .NET development. C++ (.NET version), C#, J# and VB.NET are explored with features of each language outlined. There are no usual "pro and con" lists, so the ever-popular "default public access" made into the "features of VB."

8 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Diversity by Chester+K · · Score: 3, Informative

    I seem to remember there being MORE to programming than objects.

    The .NET Framework excels at interoperability, and the key to that is their OOP system; so obviously that's what they're going to point out as the killer feature. In my opinion, you're wasting your time with .NET if you're not going to take advantage of the platform to its fullest; but there's nothing stopping you from putting your procedural code into a thin object wrapper; and Microsoft Research has put together a few reference implementations of some functional languages -- but those are "fringe" languages, so they don't get top billing.

    --

    NO CARRIER
  2. Re:Diversity by bigsteve@dstc · · Score: 4, Informative

    That is a bit unfair. While the author only deals with languages shipped by Microsoft, a number of others have been ported to the .Net platform. See here for a list.

  3. .Net is also free and (a little) portable by berntbert · · Score: 3, Informative

    The .Net framework and development tools are also free, and can be downloaded. And efforts are being made for making .Net portable. Examples include Microsoft's own Rotor (Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OSX), Mono (Linux) and DotGNU (Linux).

  4. Re:MASM? ILASM.... by thing12 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Seriously though , it would be interesting if MS (or Sun for Java) released an assembler for the intermediate language used in these VMs.

    ILAsm comes with the .net framework along with csc (C#), vbc (VB.Net), jsc (J#). That's what you're asking for, right?

    C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322>ilasm

    Microsoft (R) .NET Framework IL Assembler. Version 1.1.4322.573
    Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1998-2002. All rights reserved.

    Usage: ilasm [Options] <sourcefile> [Options]

    blah blah... usage options

  5. It depends on the meaning of "ported"... by alispguru · · Score: 2, Informative

    If by "ported" you mean "a thin layer over .NET semantics", yeah, a lot of languages have that.

    If by "ported" you mean "language X's objects are completely visible to .NET, and efficiently so", then the numbers will drop off quite a bit.

    See this thread from comp.lang.lisp on why Franz Inc (the longest-surviving Common Lisp vendor) looked into porting their stuff to .NET, and declined.

    --

    To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
  6. Re:Compare them to REAL languages by teknologikl · · Score: 2, Informative

    OK, troll, let's. So why not begin by explaining how ANSI C, C++, etc. are "real" languages, and how VB.NET, C#, are not.

    <SideNote>Grow up -- M$ is like so 90's... dude.</SideNote>

  7. Re:Crap, that's the best marketspeak in a while by Juanvaldes · · Score: 2, Informative
    On the other hand, Apple's scripting language for MacOS wasn't bad. Guess it's just a Microsoft thing.

    Hell, now you can control the GUI itself with applescript! *note* I do not use AS so I can not comment on how well it works, I'll keep my perl thanks ;-)
  8. J#? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    There's already a skin for Java on the CLR. It's called C#. The biggest headache moving from Java to C# or vice versa is the library, although for all intents and purposes they overlap almost everywhere. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I'm the network engineer at my company and I can code better C# based on my Java experience than most of our developers who have taken "classes" in C#.

    I think I'll AC on this one...